How best to make a clip of a burning house?
Feasible to do this on footage, with caveats. A few quick and ridiculous thoughts:


A pretty decent estimation of the scene referred transform for your footage. Absolutely mandatory, otherwise it is the nasty After Effects Hacks-All-The-Way-Down approach.
Good deal of reference photos of the house in question. You'd be needing these for the texturing, lighting, and supplementing the geometry I'd suspect.
A very compelling fire sim.


If the goal is absolute mimesis, most should be able to deduce that using photogrammetry techniques coupled with real footage is going to be infinitely more plausible than any from-scratch approach.

That said, no easy task by a long shot, but likely only feasible using real world footage coupled with CGI.